[bachmeier]

I can give you an idea of why it's so terrible. I'm a professor that teaches multiple classes, I run our department's grad programs, I do various kinds of service activities within the university, I'm the editor of a journal, I collaborate on research with others, and I get media inquiries from time to time. That's the professional side. I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence.

It's not that the volume of messages needing a reply is so large (though sometimes that's an issue too) but rather the time and energy required is so large. Most things don't allow for a quick one-liner off the top of your head and then going back to work. In some cases, you have to do research and make sure stuff is followed up.

My situation is by no means unique. Be thankful if you don't have to deal with it, because a lot of us do, and it's not by choice.

[ptero]

What you describe is a job that requires a lot of thoughtful, or at least meaningful, answers to a lot of people. If each answer leads to a context switch, this lands hard on any other work you do. On the comms side, this may well be a full time job; or more.

But the problem has nothing to do with email. The problem is with combining what sounds like a full time management job with a full time teaching job. In fact email makes it possible to batch those requests instead of always being interrupted at an external schedule.

And sorry -- I am not trying to tell you how to live your life, what comes next is just an engineering observation. But if one is overloaded the solution is almost always to ... reduce load. Transfer some duties and/or delegate more tasks and/or hire someone to help, etc. This is usually not easy, but IME most folks under overload who say they cannot reduce it either (1) did not try to reduce it in earnest or (2) are micromanagers who are willing to delegate only partway while maintaining the role in final decisions. My 2c.

[nradov]

You're not wrong, but university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

[ninalanyon]

Then they have to use what power they have and simply partition the workload into what must be done that is actually doable and the rest. The rest gets done if there is time, otherwise it just gets dropped.

If the institution wants more work done that there is time for in a normal working day then they simply have to hire more people like any normal company would do. If the institution cannot afford to hire more people then it simply has to admit that there are limits to what it can commit to doing.

This is what unions are for.

[nradov]

That's not how it works in any sort of job with significant individual responsibility. The institution isn't forcing them to do more work. They take it on voluntarily because they're ambitious or competitive or want to advance a worthy cause. Doing the bare minimum is possible: some people make that choice, and even without a union it usually won't get you fired. But those people usually don't accomplish much. You can't have it both ways.

[pharx]

But if they are ambitiously overloading their schedule with task they can’t handle on their own, they don’t get to complain about the workload they voluntarily signed up for.

And that’s even beside the point as email in not to blame. They would still be voluntarily overloaded in the era of snail mail with letters stacking up on their table.

[ptero]

> university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants.

Agreed, hiring in academia is both painful and tricky. But someone running a grad program for the department and who is as overloaded as the author with other duties is well placed to advocate for a secretary or a grad assistant to lighten his non-core duties.

> And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

More than for a bus driver, nurse, cook, physical therapist, etc., etc., etc.? The world is full of people who volunteer and self-assign tasks to their breaking point; then burn themselves out. They feel that they can do X best, so they convince themselves that they must. With very few exceptions, this is BS and a non-productive path to burnout. Don't be like that.

[muzani]

My mom simply did not respond to emails from students. Or even her faculty. It worked fine for her, except many people considered it rude, but nothing bad happened otherwise. She had an office, an actual one, and whenever it was important enough, people went to the office.

[nradov]

The school should have fired your mom. Students don't always have free time that aligns with instructor office hours, and some issues are best addressed in writing. Whether they like it or not, communicating with students through a variety of channels is absolutely part of a teacher's job. Those who don't want to do it should find another line of work.

[dgacmu]

This is a misunderstanding of the job of a professor. (I have some experience here.)

Our job is to teach well enough, to research well enough, and to handle administrative stuff well enough, in a context where any one of those could easily be a full time job and it's impossible to do all of them perfectly.

Having a work pattern in which the less important stuff falls through the cracks while making sure the important stuff gets handled is necessary and common. As long as people understand your pattern and can work within it it's generally ok.

[nradov]

There are a lot of college professors who are just barely good enough at teaching and administration to not get fired. Regardless of how important they think their research is, letting other things slide is disrespectful to their peers and students. We shouldn't make excuses for them.

[muzani]

One of my favorite professors put it in a different way. The classic approach is that they are lecturers first, and not teachers.

The professor is the master in their field. They go into class. They lecture on things based on their experience, answer questions, then leave. Students are there to make use of the faculty and the department to achieve their goals. If someone wanted to invent YouTube, they would go to university to study under someone who had invented some complex video compression & streaming algorithm etc. This is where universities output the outstanding individuals.

But in the 21st century, many universities are simply teaching institutions. They make sure the student understands and guide the poor ones. They make mediocre engineers, but dams and highways are built and maintained by mediocre engineers. The government unis were funded per head; literally the goal is to fill the lecture hall with as many heads as possible.

So I don't entirely disagree. In the end, my mom was not promoted to the level everyone expected of her, probably due to things like this. I do believe she actually replied to the important or thoughtful emails and just built this image of inaccessibility to seem fair to everyone.

[tracker1]

Do you expect your mechanic to open their shop at 10pm to work on your car around your schedule?

[nradov]

I expect my mechanic to reply to emails within a reasonable period of time during business hours.

[wahnfrieden]

You overestimate delegation opportunities for most teachers. With what money?

As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media inquiries - these are not optional for profs

You are accustomed to professional managerial class luxuries that are unavailable to most hard working folks

[swores]

Agree with you but would add that even on the professional managerial side it is indeed a luxury - yes for many people it would be possible, but there's also many people (in startups, or small businesses, or not small but struggling businesses) whose options are as limited as teachers.

Some of whom might have good options for changing jobs, or good hopes of things improving in the near future, but for many it would be the lesser evil compared to trying to find a different job with the same positives (whether salary or other motivation) but without those negatives.

[ptero]

> As for reducing: research, grad programs, journals, media inquiries - these are not optional for profs

For a tenured professor (and someone who runs the department's grad program and teaches many classes almost certainly has a tenure) all of those are optional. During my PhD I have seen all sorts of arrangements, including tenured profs who taught minimum load and did nothing else. No grad students, no special courses, no seminars, nada. I am not advocating this. It is, in my book, not a good approach unless you spending all other time to solve Riemannian Hypothesis or something like this. But tenure gives a prof a lot of leeway on how much to work and what to work on. My 2c.

[skrishnamurthi]

I'm the author of the original article, I'm a tenured professor, and none of these things is optional for me. Indeed, I wrote this article several years into being a full professor, because my obligations had only grown, not reduced, by virtue of all the promotions. Of course different people have different senses of how "obliged" they are or should be.

[ptero]

It is important to clarify what we mean by "obligated / not optional", as I think there is a terminology mismatch.

When I said that a particular job task is not optional I mean that not doing this task will lead to a disciplinary action from the employer (being fired, put on a performance improvement clock with the HR, etc.). Reducing those tasks brings in one set of considerations.

Your definition of "obliged", if I understand it correctly, is primarily a self-assigned or a community-expected one: "if I stop running this seminar or remove myself from that editorial board, I will feel I am not doing all I can / my colleagues will look at me askance". But it will not trigger retaliation from the employer. Reducing overload from those tasks brings a completely different set of considerations.

[phantasmish]

> I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence.

Weird how much this can differ. I have those things and sometimes go months without looking at my email. 99.99% of messages I care about are in one of two messaging apps, or some app or another reads what matters from email for me so I don’t actually read the email myself (mostly shipping updates).